Notes on Productivity Home Page

Today I tried installing the WildFire application for Lotus Notes by ISW. I had hoped to be able to use this as a productivity tool to save me the time of updating and managing each individual social networking site I use.

WildFire is a Lotus Notes application for your sidebar that allows you to update your status in one place and let the software do the rest. WildFire will take that status and update all of your various social networking accounts - without your ever having to log in. WildFire is a free download from the OpenNTF web site and you can watch a video over here.

What I thought would be a quick and easy installation, however, turned into a major four hour project as I ran into many problems with both the installation process and with using WildFire itself. For example: in the installation instructions, they told me to go to Lotus Notes and go to "File-> Application -> Install." In my Lotus Notes, however, I was unable to find the "Install" option. After about an hour of frustrated searching, my sister and my dad called Bruce Elgort who directed us to this site. (Apparently I wasn't the first person to be baffled by the process of installing composite applications in Notes. I wonder if they could have made it any harder?)

To enable the "Install" option, follow these steps:

1. Close you Lotus Notes client 2. Browse to the plugin_customization.ini in the notes application folder\framework\rcp 3. Add com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true 4. Save and close file and restart Lotus Notes

You can now find the Eclipse update manager under File > Application > Application Management.

The installation process seemed to run more smoothly after that (although some of the instructions had to be completed through trial and error due to unclear directions), but using WildFire itself was a different matter entirely.

It was a bit confusing at first as to how to link WildFire to my private accounts, but after some hunting (and trial and error) I was able to successfully connect. Unfortunately, I was not able to be able to make WildFire display my feeds. Also, when I tried making a test post in WildFire, I was unable to see it when I logged into any of my social networking sites. Then, Notes crashed. Finally, in frustration, I restarted Lotus Notes to see if that would fix the problems. When Notes was fully logged in again, I found that all of my connections had been erased.

I was initially very excited by what this product promised and I do hope to give it another try someday, but after nearly four hours of trying to make it work I've run out of time and patience.

I have read that Wildfire is popular Notes application, so there must be a way to make it work. Hopefully, for people that want to try, this post and the link above will be a help.